In a process known as live migration of virtual machines (VMs), a VM's runtime state can be moved without disruption or downtime to a different physical host. Live migration of VMs is essential for increasing the mobility of virtual machines and improving resource utilization in a data center. In addition, techniques have been developed for system administrators to migrate persistent data of a VM, e.g., its virtual disks, between or across data stores with no significant disruption or downtime. This enables efficient and flexible storage management in a virtual infrastructure, such as array migration, storage upgrade, and dynamic optimization of storage performance.
One technique for migrating persistent data of a VM between or across data stores with very little disruption or downtime is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/184,134, filed Feb. 9, 2009 and entitled, “Online Virtual Machine Disk Migration,” the entire contents of which is incorporated by reference herein. In this technique, redo logs are employed to store copies of those blocks of a VM's persistent data that have changed while the migration process is being carried out iteratively. Each redo log stores copies of the changed blocks during one iteration of the migration process and is copied over to the destination at the end of the iteration. The migration process is completed by pausing the VM and merging the redo logs at the destination with an initial copy of the VM's persistent data that was created at the destination at the beginning of the migration process.
One of the drawbacks of the redo log approach is that the virtual machine whose persistent data is being migrated uses two different data stores to store its persistent data while the process is ongoing. This is undesirable because relying on two data stores increases vulnerability of the virtual machine during data migration in that a crash of either the source data store or the destination data store will become a failure condition.
Another drawback of the redo log approach is the size of the redo logs. If the VM has a lot of write activity during the migration process, the redo logs can become quite large in size and consume extra storage capacity. Further, if the redo logs are large in size, the final step of merging the redo logs with the initial copy of the VM's persistent data, which is carried out while the VM is paused, may take too long and result in VM downtime.